My once monthly trip to Hong Kong was under a leaden and saturated sky. Guangzhou and much of the province has been under siege for almost two weeks, a steady, lazy draining of the swollen and claustrophobic heavens. The last trip, I sat facing forward on the train’s left side; this time I sat facing backwards on it’s starboard side, traveling south, and looking west. This meant I could not anticipate a shot, and most of the photos are of whatever was after what was interesting, that with a half-second delay had already long passed by.
After writing about famous village incidents of Guangdong yesterday, I was trying today to be as impartial as possible in capturing what Guangdong looks like along the KCR industrial corridor. Of course certain things appeal to my aesthetic: satanically black, corpulent and necrotic concrete factories. The endless catacombs of industrial slums, mortared with a generation’s paste of impermeable refuse satisfies my disgust for rapacious development.
In mostly equal thirds then, the hour-long journey is split between this odious mess, bland acres of salmon-tiled inflatable high-rise apartments, and verdant fields and ponds. What the farms, along with their villages, are being replaced with is not something I think is an improvement.
